


green around the circle's edge

by kimaracretak



Category: An Enchantment of Ravens - Margaret Rogerson
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-02 16:11:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21164438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: Isobel is a queen. Lark is ... something.





	green around the circle's edge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).

Isobel would be the first to admit that she had no sense of what it meant to be a queen among the fair folk, not even after seeing the Alder King's body rise from the earth and stone. No preparations, no bargain with a noble or dream from Hemlock or giggled nonsense song from the twins could have made her ready for the new anchor that set in her chest, the bridge pinning her into the autumnlands from the world she'd always called her home.

And yet she had known, to some extent, what she didn't know. She knew the Good Law, and the importance of names, and the ways in which punishments were meted out, and what it meant for someone like Rook to look at her with human emotions in his eyes. All of that formed at least the basis for some future understanding.

What she had not known, and now had to learn how to reckon with, was how it would feel to be the subject of Lark's undivided attention, even when the fairy herself was nowhere to be found.

Lark lay sprawled at her feet when she sat outside the house in the autumnlands she was slowly learning to call a second home. Sometimes a girl, and she stirred the memory of the same affection Isobel felt for the twins, before she caught herself and thought the better of it. Sometimes a fox, and Isobel's heart leapt like the memory of a hare, something too quick and still unsafe, before she felt her limbs again and remembered her form.

Sometimes she wore Isobel's face. Sometimes she was a woman. Sometimes she was too far into the light and her hair stood up until Isobel thought her Hemlock returned. Those times were the ones Isobel retreated inside, locked the doors as if it would matter, and wondered why she had ever thought this life possible.

Those were the nights she dreamed of Hemlock. Always the same dream: Hemlock curled at the foot of her bed, her ruined throat bleeding and her voice rattling like hail against the window: Was it worth it? Is she worth it?

Hemlock never asked after Rook, and never followed her out of the dream. And yet the more she dreamed, the more certain she was that the ragged spectre of Hemlock was real - perhaps even more real than the fairy had been at any other time.

She would ask Gadfly for help, if she didn't fear what would happen if she provoked yet more divisions between the fair folk even more than she feared Lark.

And she wondered, sometimes, whether that fear was something that the Isobel of now truly felt, or if it was a distant memory brought too close by the twisted time of the autumnlands.

Lark herself seemed more than willing to make her keep guessing. The thing behind the fairy's eyes had never known innocence, but she pretended to it with such conviction that Isobel almost wondered at the truth of the fair folk's inability to Craft.

"It's just," Lark said sometimes, "that we've never had a King or Queen from autumn in all my years. Even without your paintings, you're still bringing us something new."

In return for what, Isobel sometimes wondered, because the bargains and favours of her small studio in her aunt's house have fallen far out of use.

"It's just," Lark said sometimes, "that you have neither hunt nor hounds, and what is a fairy court without a Wild Hunt to run?"

I would only have wanted Hemlock to lead the hounds, Isobel might have said, except she was growing to wise to voice such desires in front of Lark.

Isobel was beginning to wonder if Hemlock was even dead. To wonder what of her bones or skin or voice Lark might bring, if she were brave or stupid enough to ask like the Isobel of months ago might have been.

"It's just," Lark said sometimes. "that you're only now starting to learn what it means to be alive."

Alive instead of what, Isobel sometimes wondered, and touched her lips with the memory of ice.

But Lark always kissed those wonders from her lips before Isobel could speak them and in those moments, the fear in Isobel's heart was overtaken by the certainty that she was exactly where she needed to be, with exactly the people she needed to stand by.


End file.
